Category Archives: Pacific

“President Barack Obama is ready to buck his liberal base in order to advance the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the pro-corporate international trade deal currently being negotiated in secret by the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries……..”It is the corporations, stupid.There was a time when it was true that what was good for corporate America was good for mainstreet America. Not so much anymore. Now what is good for corporate America is mainly good for the large shareholders and for the club of CEOs of America in this age of bonus-hunting by management. The real shareholders matter, not the average Jane with an IRA, as they try to tell us on the financial networks.

If you want to know what American corporations probably prefer the ideal state of American labor to be, look at China, India, and some Latin American countries. Well, a mild exaggeration to make the point perhaps, but not by much. A huge lower lower middle class enshrined in a permanent American class society the like of which has not been seen in more than a century.

Mr. Obama is in many ways like ALL other American presidents since Ronald Reagan. He is a corporation president, even though the U.S. Chamber of Commerce strongly campaigned for his Republican rivals (that was just a matter of comparative preference). His party aspires that he will be followed into the White House by the two most corporatist Democrats available in decades: Hillary and Bill Clinton. Given the country’s well-financed shift to the right, those two might be the only Democrats who have a chance to keep the White House for their party two years from now.CheersMohammed Haider Ghuloum

Neck of the woods“THE sun is a tempestuous mistress – and her out¬bursts are becoming more and more violent as the weeks go on. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spotted the summer’s first ‘X’ solar flare last Friday – a huge outburst from the sun right at the top of the scale. This came on the back of 12 ‘M’ flares in just six days, with a M6.1 flare knocking out radio signals across the planet last week – hinting at the destruc¬tion the sun could reign on our technology if Earth takes a full blast across its blow.
The sunspot group behind the flares – named as AR1515 – stretches across 191,000km of the sun’s surface. This makes its width more than 15 Earths set end to end, said NASA solar astrophysicist C. Alex Young. The biggest flares are known as “X-class flares” based on a classification system that divides solar flares according to their strength. The smallest ones are A-class, which are similar to normal background levels, followed by B, C, M and X. Similar to the Richter scale for earthquakes, each letter represents a 10-fold increase in energy output, meaning an X is 10 times an M and 100 times a C. The sun is now heading into the peak of its 11- year solar flare cycle, with 2013 expected to the tu¬multuous year.
With the increased spread in communications in the last 11 years, a severe solar storm could cause huge issues for the planet. Radio blackouts occur when the X-rays or ex¬treme UV light from a flare disturb the layer of Earth’s atmosphere known as the ionosphere, through which radio waves travel.
The constant changes in the ionosphere change the paths of the radio waves as they move, thus de¬grading theinformation they carry…………..”